The Things I Stole

I stole a BOAC Speedbird lapel badge from my friend Mark Pertwee. I was eight years old and it was the first act of conscious larceny that I can remember. BOAC - British Overseas Airways Corporation - that dates me; and the "Speedbird" logo is now long gone, also. I can see the small badge in my mind's eye: a 10-pence piece would cover it - navy blue, edged with silver, a cross between a notional bird-shape and an arrowhead - modern, thrusting, stylish, everything that the 1960s, BOAC and its fleet of mighty, navy blue and white, four-engined, turboprop planes were meant to embody...

Mark Pertwee's mother was a travel agent and she was a source of all manner of travel agent freebies: timetables, small desktop models of planes (KLM, Pan Am, Air France), little plastic pennants of national flags and their carriers, and she generously shared this bounty with me as well as her son (I was his best friend), but she pointedly did not give me a Speedbird lapel badge. Perhaps she was only provided with one, herself, perhaps it was valuable - silver plate and enamel - it now strikes me. And perhaps this was why I coveted it so.

I planned my theft well. First of all, I hid it in the Pertwee house, in the cupboard under the sink in the guest toilet. I waited a fortnight (Mark seemed oblivious to its disappearance) before I pocketed it one day and took it home. I never showed it to my parents or my three older sisters - indeed I never wore the Speedbird lapel badge in my lapel. It was, in a way, a pointless theft - Mark Pertwee never knew he had lost it and I was never able to sport it. Was it, even, a bona fide theft, worthy of the name, given it had never been registered as stolen in the theft-victim's mind? I think I lost it in one of my parents' many house moves. I wonder why I stole it at all.

I stole cigarettes from my mother - never money, I want to make that absolutely clear. She smoked heavily, two packs a day, and favoured a brand called Peter Stuyvesant, a cigarette with a somewhat astringent, throat-warming taste, as I recall (and much enjoyed by raffish, square-jawed, Caucasian airline pilots, if the advertisements were to be believed). I would steal four or five cigarettes a week, and she never spotted they had gone.

I ask myself again: is this an example of another non-theft? What category of genuine theft have we here? In my teens, I must have stolen hundreds, possibly thousands, of cigarettes from her. She would buy cigarettes in cartons and, as I grew more bold, I would steal entire packs from the drawer in her bedroom where she kept her stash. My father was a pipe-smoker, with a penchant for fragrant, aromatic tobaccos (until he died in his 50s from lung cancer). Our house reeked of smoke, like a pub. I smoked in my bedroom and no one noticed; my three sisters smoked. It was like that in those days.

I smoked regularly through my teens, even after my father died, and only gave up when I married my first wife, Encarnacion. She detested smoke and smokers to a neurotic degree - I would not have managed a kiss had I not forsworn cigarettes. I think back to all that subterfuge - opening my mother's handbag, rifling through its contents looking for the Peter Stuyvesant soft-pack, checking to see how many were left - always risky to steal if there were under 10. Then a few heart-thumping seconds watching her fish in her bag to light up herself, and, later, the furtive, head-reeling inhalation with my friends down the lane, under the railway bridge; the subsequent needless deodorising of the mouth - chewing gum, Listerine - and clothes and body (Brut aftershave was particularly masking). For years I must have walked through my house leaving in my wake a pungent, invisible contrail of chemical perfume. Nobody noticed, ever.

I stole food at my boarding school. We were allowed a modest food parcel once a week (like POWs) from a local grocer: a few bananas, a box of dates, mini-packs of cornflakes - no buns or cakes, no chocolates, nothing that could be purchased from the school tuck shop where fizzy drinks, colas, biscuits and every tooth-rotting sweet the confectionery industry could serve up were on offer.

In my house there was a very rich Greek boy whose food parcel might have come from Fortnum & Mason, such was its size and magnificence. I and my coevals pillaged this boy's food with no compunction (he was plump and cried easily). It was thanks to Stavros's food parcel that I developed my enduring taste for Patum Peperium, Gentleman's Relish, a dark, pesto-like spread made from anchovies. It is my Proustian madeleine - it summons up all my early pilfering. I can taste its earthy, farinaceous salinity now.

I stole other things, as well - everyone stole at my school - it was tacitly understood that we all stole from each other, all the time. We stole food, drink, deodorant, shampoo, clothes, pornography, pens, stationery, books... We also shoplifted shamelessly and efficiently in the local town and villages. Only stealing money from your schoolmates was the ultimate sin, which brought permanent pariah-status on the perpetrator and earned him, for the duration of his school career, the nickname of "Fingers" - his personal badge of iniquity, his mark of Cain.

I stole a pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses from a department store in Bath where I was at university doing a degree in architecture. I tried them on, then tried on a dozen others, replacing some back on their little racks, taking them off again and, halfway through this elaborate process, putting on my own spectacles and slipping the Ray-Bans into my spectacle case. I wore them all summer to much acclaim. I was probably wearing them when I met Encarnacion (my future wife, the one who hated smoking) who was an au pair for a solicitor's family in Bristol.

I look back on my university years as my thieving pomp. I stole at will, whenever I felt like it. Nothing grand, nothing exceptional, just things I wanted and didn't feel like paying for. I stole newspapers and magazines (the New Statesman, Mayfair, Men Only, Flight, Gramophone); I stole hardback books (I still remember some titles: The History Man, Keats And Embarrassment, The Metropolitan Critic); I stole food - Mars bars, sandwiches, fruit. I once stole a haunch of venison from a delicatessen. One day I stole a tin of cherry pie-filling - I've no idea why: I don't particularly like cherries and had no intention of making a pie. The man who ran the corner shop, where I casually lifted the tin from a shelf on my way out, saw me and gave chase. I lost him after a couple of streets - I ran fast - but I have never since experienced such a pure rush of emotion: an atavistic fear followed by an adrenaline-fuelled exhilaration that made me sway as I stood there catching my breath.

I stole nothing for several years - I simply stopped stealing for a while. Perhaps it was marriage to Encarnacion, the swift arrival of the twins (Lolita and Bonita) and the responsibilities that went with my job. I was an architect in a large and prestigious firm - the Freedlander, Cobb Partnership - I was a married man and a father of two lovely little girls. Stealing in these circumstances would seem demeaning, despoiling, almost filthy. All right, like everyone else I fiddled my expenses, but no one in their right mind would call that theft. However, it was over a fractious and unpleasant formal query about my expenses that I met the managing partner of Freedlander, Cobb - Margaret Warburton, FCA, and my life changed.

I stole my daughters' happiness. Perhaps that's too strong: I stole Lolita and Bonita's right to a stable family life with two parents, a father and a mother. To this day I don't know how Encarnacion discovered my affair with Margaret Warburton, but when she presented the evidence of our liaison (her father, Jose, and her brother, Severiano, also sternly present, their dark eyes shining with implacable loathing), it was compendious and irrefutable. We separated, she took the girls back to Valladolid, we divorced and I moved in with Margaret.

I missed the girls but I did not miss Encarnacion much, I have to confess. There is a problem marrying someone who speaks your own language imperfectly - all nuance is lost: and with nuance goes humour, irony, sarcasm, subtext, secrets. All these were present with Margaret - a clever, sly and salacious mind operated beneath that perfect accountant's exterior: the lean, pale, expressionless face, the deliberately too-tight, well-cut suits, the coiffed, dark helmet of hair, the black-framed officious spectacles - swiftly removed and swiftly replaced to make forensic points in meetings. Indeed, it was exactly this juxtaposition that made my adulterous sex life with her so energetic and alluring. I didn't take enough care - I didn't take any care, I now realise; all I wanted and waited for was the covert rendezvous, the snatched weekend, the airport hotel, the meeting of two cars, nose to nose, in some rural layby.

I stole pounds 985,622 from Freedlander, Cobb over a period of seven years. Margaret Warburton, the managing partner, supervising the burgeoning accounts of the firm, saw the opportunity, especially as more and more of our projects were abroad - the desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, the new terminal at Kolkata airport, three office blocks in Shanghai, and so on. She needed a senior partner to collude - and why wouldn't I collude with my clever wife? (We married shortly after the divorce, but told no one, not even my mother and sisters - Margaret's idea.) I signed wherever she told me - overruns, unforeseen expenses, delays, extra hours worked because of global time differences - the opportunities were manifold. In a $100m contract, do you notice an extra $80,000? No, not if it's all properly accounted. We were careful, we took our time, we weren't greedy. Small amounts on almost every job were hived off and banked in the Cayman Islands. Sometimes we deliberately admitted to our mistakes, apologised and reimbursed the client. Everything appeared above board. We lived well, holidayed discreetly but at considerable expense (Margaret bought us a permanent suite on one of those floating cruise-ship hotels) and we maintained separate houses for form's sake. When we were arrested together, in Margaret's office in the new Freedlander, Cobb HQ in Southwark - the one that looks like a hand grenade - it came as a massive shock. I felt like an innocent man, wrongly arraigned on a trumped-up charge.

I stole tobacco from my fellow prisoners in the austere but not intolerable open prison where I was sent to pay my debt to society for my shameful white-collar crime. For some reason, I received a sentence of six years and Margaret three. Tobacco, cigarettes - is this the thieving leitmotif in my life? I stole tobacco - I'd given up smoking years before, remember - to buy alcohol. Prisoners who worked in the allotments made a virulently potent hooch from potatoes and other tubers. I would pinch fingerfuls of roll-up tobacco from casually set-down plastic envelopes of the stuff, and when I had enough accumulated (a fistful, say) would exchange it for half a pint of moonshine and a few hours of oblivion. It was like drinking some sort of burning, ruthless, liquid toxin; you sensed small ulcers forming in your stomach almost immediately. You felt it could have de-iced aeroplanes in the Arctic, stripped paint from antique cars. It was marvellously strong. My drink problem became more acute after Margaret left prison and divorced me. She moved abroad, to Latin America, and I never heard from her again, of course. How much had we really stolen? I had no idea. The prosecuting council came up with the pounds 985,622 figure, but for all I know it could have been double. It was entirely Margaret's plan, the whole operation - she was the thief, the real thief, not me. Old Julius Freedlander himself took the stand to destroy my character, claiming only to be "sadly disappointed" with Margaret's betrayal. She was demure, only rarely weepy - I think I seemed some brutal mastermind who had dumped his nice Spanish wife to manipulate this blameless accountant. Both Margaret and I were advised by our briefs to plead guilty, advice we took - it seemed to work for her.

I stole three and a half pints of bitter, a near-full gin and tonic and a Bacardi Breezer in the Richard The Lionheart in Cromer, Norfolk, last night. It's laughably easy - a legacy of my prison-induced alcoholism. I steal drinks in crowded pubs at weekends or, better still, pubs with beer gardens in the summer. I sit nursing my bitter lemon or Diet Coke waiting for the bar staff to emerge and start clearing up empty glasses. I just follow them around, and in the bustle that their progress creates more often than not can help myself to an unguarded drink, take it as far away as possible and consume it quickly. Crowds of young men and women, always leaving their drinks to go out and smoke, are very fair game. You'll see five or six glasses on a ledge or table - nobody knows whose drink it is, nobody pays attention. Solitary drinkers who leave their drink to go to the lavatory are also useful prey. It's amazing how many people buy a pint or a glass of wine, and leave without finishing them. I discreetly help myself to these unwanted drinks - but then again that's not stealing. If you read a discarded newspaper on the train, have you stolen it? Of course not.

To go into prison a successful, highly-trained, middle-class professional and emerge a semi-functioning alcoholic was hardly what I planned and naturally, after the disgrace, the profession no longer allowed me to call myself "Architect". I managed to buy a small cottage in South Runton, near Cromer, and set myself up as a "Designer". In the first years I was commissioned to do a few jobs - a cricket pavilion, a conservatory in a nursery, a wing of a doctors' clinic in King's Lynn, and managed to live quietly, respectably. But the jobs seemed slowly but steadily to diminish - I wonder if word had leaked out somehow about the Freedlander, Cobb scandal. I wouldn't be surprised if Julius Freedlander himself wasn't quietly blackening my name around East Anglia... In any event I haven't worked in 18 months and I'm seriously behind on my mortgage repayments. I recently sold my car and bought a bicycle.

My great pleasure, apart from drinking, are my daughters, Lolita and Bonita - rather, I should say "Lola y Bona". They are a pop sensation in Spain and other Mediterranean countries - Greece, Croatia, Cyprus. They have a website: lolaybona.es - check it out, their fame is local but huge. I cycle into Cromer once a week and buy all the foreign celebrity magazines, you know the ones - Calor!, Proximite, Peep'L. I cut out the pictures of Lola y Bona and stick them on a huge pinboard that covers one wall in my kitchen. My wall of celebration, I call it, at least something turned out well.

Last week I took my pile of magazines into the Lionheart and flicked through them looking for pictures of my babies. I found a couple of them at a film festival in Dubrovnik. Tanned, lithe, sexy girls with black, black hair, like their mother. Identical twins, that's the catch, you see - the songs they sing seem entirely ordinary, bouncy, rhythmic, heavy on percussion, thumping drums - but those girls, 18 years old, impossible to tell them apart.

A man I vaguely know wondered if I'd like a drink, so I asked for a large vodka and tonic. I think he's a novelist, very curious about my stint in the open prison. I tell him colourful anecdotes about "doing time" - I suspect it's all going into a book. After he'd gone I procured a couple of half pints and most of a large glass of red wine. I wandered out on to the front. I like Cromer, perched on the edge of England, on the edge of England's plump, round bum. I think of continental Europe out there, across the North Sea, and wonder where Lola y Bona might be: Majorca, Zagreb, Larnaca, Tel Aviv? It makes me feel I'm not that far away from them - not close, but not far away.

There's a large bric-a-brac antique shop in a side street by the pier and I wandered in to kill some time. I was stunned to see, in a small display of badges and brooches pinned on a velvet cushion, a BOAC Speedbird lapel badge. I asked to have a look at it and inquired about the price. The owner - he has mutton-chop whiskers and wears loud checked suits and coloured waistcoats - told me it was pounds 150. There was no price ticket, of course - what kind of fool did he take me for? "Very rare," he added, "extremely." I asked him his best price and he said he couldn't go lower than 130. I laughed, I scoffed - I told him I'd had one of those BOAC Speedbird lapel badges when I was a boy. Should have hung on to it, mate, he said, smugly: very rare, much sought after by collectors of airline memorabilia. I said I'd think about it and then stuck the badge back on the cushion but was careful not to fully close the securing pin. I'll come back next weekend - it's a bank holiday - wander around the shop when he's distracted by the crowd - and steal it.

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